A species of oval squid exhibited amazing camouflaging abilities never before recorded. Photo: Ryuta Nakajima / OIST.
It’s strange how much we don’t know about the creatures we share the planet with, isn’t it? Every day, researchers are surprised by something or another, and recently, researchers realized that an animal we know quite a bit about does something we didn’t know about: squids, like octopuses and cuttlefish, can change their colors to blend into their surroundings.
“To date,” explained an author of a recent study published in Scientific Reports, “studies of cephalopod camouflage-to-substrate have been focused primarily on benthic cuttlefish and octopus, because they are readily found sitting on the substrate.”
The discovery happened in a laboratory at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), which is likely the only place it could have happened, since the fact that squids are hard to keep alive in captivity. Since squids spend most of their time floating around in open water, that’s where we’re able to study them most. Researchers wanted to see what they did when they’re near structures or on the ocean floor.
“Squid usually hover in the open ocean but we wanted to find out what happens when they move a bit closer to a coral reef or if they’re chased by a predator to the ocean floor,” explained Dr. Ryuta Nakajima, one of three authors of the study, in a statement.
To get around the problem of keeping squids alive in a tank, researchers took a novel approach. They took a species of oval squid that lives in the waters off Okinawa, Japan and bred it to live in captivity. Which is pretty sad, if you think too hard about it, but such is the nature of progress.
The discovery, however, happened by accident. When researchers at OIST were cleaning the algae from the squid tanks, they noticed that the animals were changing colors as they swam over the algae.
“Excited by the chance observation,” wrote Rachel Funnell for IFLScience, “the researchers conducted a controlled experiment to get a better idea of what was going on. In it, they left half a tank to develop algae while keeping the other half clean and set up cameras to observe what happened next.”
And lo and behold, the squids in the tank proved the theory, camouflaging themselves as they moved from one side of the tank to another.
“This effect really is striking. I am still surprised that nobody has noticed this ability before us,” said another author, Dr. Zdenek Lajbner. “It shows just how little we know about these wonderful animals.”
